Quote:
But there are rare occasions that I find someone who seems to be beyond help. Where one has gone so far that they show complete disregard or just plain ignorance of the tools they're weilding.
I think I know what you're talking about. For example, the RatioMaster was designed to help people with a slow connection to survive - and some of them got greedy and started cheating and leeching as much as you can.
Quote:
So I ask you all, are there faux pas when it comes to cheating? What would you regard as foolhardy behavior when cheating?
Yes, there are - users grabbing a ratio cheating tool and instantly going to "bash" their favorite tracker with it, disregarding the existence of scripts, or the fact that faking 1 terabyte in 1 minute is easy to notice. This also makes trackers improve their scripts to catch more cheaters. And sites such as seba, providing stolen mods with no support, further encourage such behavior.
Quote:
What about the inviter/invitee relationship?
When it's your account that you're screwing that's fine and I'd just call it plain stupidity - but what if you have been invited by a friend and he's warned, loses his inviting privileges, or even gets disabled because of your behavior? That's a completely different (and much worse) thing. Some sites, such as BCG, go to the extent of banning the whole invite tree sometimes. This means I, as well as all the other people I have invited, will lose their account because of such a stupid person.
I'd personally never invite such a person again to any other site, at least not until they realize what they did and become much more experienced - because of their total lack of consideration for the account of someone that freely gave them the opportunity to become and stay being a part of the site (I don't trade, so when I invite someone it's either because he's my friend, or I'm doing a giveaway).
Quote:
Should a trackers general health ever be considered?
When I started I didn't care about my (few) trackers' health. They were all places where to leech my stuff from, as well as cheating if the number after "Ratio:" was close to being smaller than 1. But after time passes, you kind of realize that stopping a torrent with 2000 seeders and 100 leechers right after the download finishes is "fine", but doing the same thing on one with 10 seeders and 1 leecher isn't. Just because you can cheat to avoid having to stay seeding and uploading, it doesn't mean you should. I even considered making ScT my main download tracker recently - you may have heard this from me numerous times, but they really shouldn't care about me and my 3Mbit line cheating, when their seedbox-infested swarms can upload at more than 450 times the same speed I can download. With the seedbox users shoving screenshots of how awesome their 100+MB/s speeds are in others' faces while I don't even have one (and probably never will for the time being), I don't feel like I owe that site anything when taking and not giving back.
Quote:
What are some common mistakes for new users?
- not using Search before cheating, and doing things like using Multi uTorrent mods at Waffles. Even if you don't care about your account and can get another invite easily, someone contributing to the site could have used your newly-disabled account's spot. Also, it's a bit stupid to lose an account just because you didn't take five minutes to search this board and check what works and what doesn't.
- trying to sign up at every new tracker just because its name sounds cool, for example. I used to do this when I was new, and quickly ended up with a big list of usernames and passwords. After letting the accounts I didn't use other than for logging in once every 29 days, I'd only have a few left. (This doesn't mean new sites will never get anywhere - all trackers started small -, or that you shouldn't have signed up at TL/RevTT/BCG or even BitMeTV just because they opened, though.) And here comes a subset of this:
- collecting accounts. Yes, we're all a bit of collectors. No one needs "just" TL. But what are you going to do with 80 sites other than logging in to keep most of them alive? There's probably another person that actually wants to really use the site.
- assuming that a higher "level" means better content/speeds/etc., and that you HAVE to get inside that tracker. Same goes for cheating difficulty. Levels only indicate how hard it is to get inside a tracker, and nothing else. A higher level DOES NOT mean the site is good, or that it's hard to cheat there. In my opinion, TL (level 3) and TvT (level 2) are better than ScT (level 6) and BitMeTV (level 4) as 0-Day and TV trackers, for example.
- assuming that because something worked on one tracker it'll work on all of them. This is by far only true for the Extreme Mod, and you still need to pick the right torrent and use the right speeds. Just because flashing 50GB in 10 seconds with the PMR worked at RevTT it doesn't mean it will at ScT, and thus we go back to the first point on this list.
There may be more to it. This is what I can come up with right now.